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From: flee@cse.psu.edu (Felix Lee)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.ascii,alt.ascii-art,alt.binaries.pictures.ascii
Subject: Talk: Should I html'ize the FAQ?
Date: 3 Sep 1994 19:43:14 -0500
Organization: Penn State Comp Sci & Eng
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Joshua Bell:
>I guess it boils down to: do you want just "eye candy" documents
>which have no extrinsic value, or a useful resource document
>which might be a little less compact and less cute, but is
>useful?

This is similar to the reason I hate the Motif look&feel.  It's very
heavy on eye candy that chews up screen real estate for no reason.

But I'd argue the layout of the ascii FAQ is not eye candy.  It's
information-dense and makes good use of visual space.  Perhaps the
cost of doing this is too high, but that's for Bob Allison to decide.
ascii art is very much concerned with visual layout, and it's quite
sensible to apply these techniques to the FAQ itself.

>The merged format may be pretty, but it isn't really useful, if
>someone wants to extract text or artwork from the FAQ.

It's only hard to extract text or artwork from the FAQ if you're stuck
with oppressively linear text editors.  Anyone interested in doing
ascii art is probably going to want an editor with 2-D text support
anyway.

>Okay, okay, that's going to be pointless to convert to HTML. Not
>due to any failings in HTML itself, but due to the conceptual
>problems; you've already merged two types of information into one
>(text and ascii-art into one plain text document). The equivalent
>would be to take a magazine layout page, save it as a GIF, and
>then complain when converting it to HTML would be a bother.

but it *is* a failing of HTML.  HTML is okay as a document-structure
language, but it isn't particularly great as a layout language.  It
isn't rich enough to describe non-trivial layouts in a sensible
fashion.  You can't even do simple things like two-column text.  So
why bother using HTML as a source language for the ascii FAQ?

now, going the other way may be plausible.  Or perhaps using a third
form that will generate both plain ascii and html...
--